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Drilling Fossilized Woolly Mammoth Tusk

In April of this year, we received one of those calls that just makes your day. You know, the kind of call that grabs your attention and makes you glad you do what you do.

You see, our customers come from a very diverse background of business. There are AutoDrill products working in radioactive atmospheres. There are AutoDrill products stirring blood samples for a medical company. There are AutoDrills spinning baked hams while they are spiral sliced. ..We even have a few out there drilling steel, aluminum, etc. Can you imagine? <grin>

So it was that on April 29th that we received a call from a company that makes custom grips for 1911 handguns and some other very specialized items. The specialized grip for the 1911 we help them make is fossilized Woolly Mammoth tusk material. …And at the time, they needed to drill two holes in it. The initial discussion went something like this:

“Good afternoon, AutoDrill.”

Q – “Can you offer a multi-drill to make two 1/4″ holes in fossilized Woolly Mammoth tusk material?”

A – “Um… Hmm… Yes. That’s unique, but yes we can.”

At that point, our sales person was saying to themselves that it must be a joke or a friend making a prank phone call… But we have also learned to never doubt the legitimacy of a job until it’s clear someone is messing with us so we just continued on with the call.

So… Here we are just a few weeks later. We shipped the product with a custom drill press adapter to the customer on May 15. The customer now has the AutoDrill multiple spindle drill working in their shop and they are indeed drilling fossilized Woolly Mammoth tusk material. You have to love that!

We often say we love solving the unique problems brought to us. Well, the only thing we might find more enjoyable is the knowledge that our products can, and are used in some of the most unique applications in the world.

If you would like to learn more about the products made by this particular customer, please visit their site here: